I'm in Washington, DC this week for work so I got to attend the first ever Open Developer day at FCC headquarters yesterday. While it was pretty different from Hack Days I've attended at Yahoo! and Twitter (think: classical music versus Beck), it was a fantastic opportunity to meet a lot of people deeply interested in civic hacking, public collaboration, and open government. My full report is over at FastCompany.com: Field Notes From the FCC's First-Ever Hack Day. Update: I also got to do a video interview with Alex Howard on Open Developer Day. Thanks, Alex!
Derek Powazek's post, Twitter for Adults, is a nice summary of how to use Twitter well. Reading it, I realized what my single best Twitter survival technique is: a private VIP list. It looks like I'm following 551 people in total on Twitter, but in practice, that is just not possible. So, I put people whose tweets I don't want to miss on the VIP list, which appears as my first column in TweetDeck. Right now there are only 51 people on that list, well below Dunbar's number, and I intend to keep it that way. On busy days (and let's face it, most are), I read only that list of tweets, my mentions and direct messages. When I have more time, I scan over to my All Friends list. Sometimes I promote people from All Friends to VIP if their stuff is really interesting; other times I demote folks from my VIP list if they're driving me crazy. The fact that the list is private means no one's feelings are hurt if they're not on it, and this setup means I can follow people liberally without worrying about them cluttering up my primary timeline. I use a similar technique with my RSS reader subscriptions, and it's one of the best ways I've found to focus my attention on the good stuff, while auditioning more potential good stuff in my All Friends/Subscriptions list, too.
When you have lots of ideas for things to make, how do you choose which projects to actually work on?
In this episode of Work Smart, idea guy Bryan Serven asks the question every entrepreneur has wrestled with; I offer a way to reframe the question and weigh your options, and author of Do More Great Work Michael Bungay Stanier weighs in with a great tip. Press the play button below, and then check out part 2, which covers how you know when to kill a project you're already working on.
Working remotely is so liberating--you get to do what you do best, in a location of your choice, sans commute, maybe even in your pajamas, without your co-workers or boss always looking over your shoulder. But telecommuting also requires a lot more effort when it comes to maintaining relationships and connections with people back at the office. In this week's episode of Work Smart, IBMer Rich Edwards asks about the best practices for staying connected and building relationships from afar. I share some advice based on my own work-at-home experience, and then I ask author of Telecommuting Success Michael Dziak for his. Hit play on the video above to watch and check out the accompanying mind map over at FastCompany.com.
The perennial question we always got from obsessive Lifehacker readers: How do you actually be more productive if you spend all your time looking for new ways to get stuff done?
In this week's episode of Work Smart 2, I got to give my best answer to that question. Bill Clark asks how you can actually work smarter when you spend a lot of time learning new productivity tricks. I share my favorite tool for keeping yourself honest, and then asked author of productivity bible Getting Things DoneDavid Allen for his thoughts. (In short: there are worse ways to waste time.)
Press play on the 2-minute, 30-second video clip below.
When it comes to storing passwords, I've been a KeePass fan and user for years now, but when Leo Laporte told me he uses LastPass, I had to check it out. I don't love the idea of syncing my password file to a third-party web site--I'm that paranoid--but it is a total pain to cart around my KeePass database file. Now that I've tried LastPass, I'm sold--well, for my lower-security logins, anyway. This week's Work Smart video covers the security vs. convenience tug-of-war you have to put up with when deciding on any password system, and why LastPass is a solid choice.
I've travelled to 9 different cities already this year and I've got 4 different major work projects going on, so keeping on top of everything on the go is something I've had to get good at out of necessity. This week's Work Smart video is a question from Daniel Beck, a work-at-homer like I am, about how to not let your whole organization system fall to pieces once you leave your (home) office.
I was lucky enough to get none other than David Allen to agree to be my expert in this segment. I was pretty nervous talking to David, as his material has been an inspiration for me for years now. Hopefully I didn't come off as too much of a dork on Skype with him.
How to Use Your Tech Power for Good
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Last week Leo Laporte did a Gov 2.0 special show on TWiT with Tim O'Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka, a must-listen for programmers who want to use their skills to make the world a better place. It opened with this Code for America spot, which features Tim, Mark Zuckerberg, Caterina Fake, and Biz Stone. The Code for America fellowship application deadline has passed, but if you want to use your coding skills to help our government make better policy decisions, you can do so by contributing to ThinkUp. ∞ September 3rd, 2010, 2 comments
The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back.
Despite the fact that I still can't watch and listen to myself on film without cringing, I am so pleased with the results. Adam Barenblat at FastCompany did an amazing job on the art and design, which is based on a fun new webapp: Popplet.
One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "How can I learn how to code?" Today fluorescentinca showed me Google Code University, a collection of tutorials on Googly languages (like Python, Java and Go) for relative beginners. Some good stuff there. (I also wrote a more general Lifehacker piece last year that can help you decide what language to start in.)
My greatest hope for the hotly-rumored, might-launch-any-day-now social networking app "Google Me" is that it will not merely clone Facebook in a weak attempt at parity, but that it will innovate and solve problems that plague existing social networks.
Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.
Update, September 30: Five episodes have already aired on topics like securely saving passwords, avoiding the pitfalls of productivity porn, and taking great meeting notes. Now I'm looking for more questions from readers like you. The more specific and answerable-in-2-minutes your question is, the more likely it is to get chosen. Email your question to worksmart@fastcompany.com. Thanks in advance!
Thrilled to announce I'm prepping to shoot a new Q&A video series for Fast Company. Work Smart 2 will be a question and answer consultation with viewers and readers like you. If you've got a burning question to ask me about tech and productivity, this is your chance.
Here's how it works:
1. Email me at worksmart@fastcompany.com or leave a comment here on this post with your question. Topics might include things like email overload, mobile apps, cloud computing, productivity, or anything related to working and living saner, smarter and more efficiently with tech tools.
2. If we choose your submission, you and I will schedule a video Skype consultation where we record your question and my advice. I'll even call in some of my best tech-savvy expert friends for help.
3. We'll edit together the clip and run it on FastCompany.com and right here on Smarterware.
Interested in getting a little video Skype Q&A going? Here are the details. Can't wait to talk to you.
Hilary Mason: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script
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Just stumbled upon a YouTube clip of one of the best Ignite presentations I've seen, by Hilary Mason, a computer scientist at Bit.ly. Mason wrote a series of scripts that auto-respond to email with particular content, and auto-nag folks she's emailed but hasn't gotten a response from yet. Hit the play button to hear more. She says once the code's fit for sharing she'll put it up on GitHub. Cannot wait. ∞ May 25th, 2010, 6 comments
When you have lots of ideas for things to make, how do you choose which projects to actually work on? 
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